Zimmer tallies legal costs for temporarily recalled Durom MoM hips at over $600M

Orthopedic giant Zimmer expects the total legal tab for its Durom metal-on-metal acetabular hip implants to exceed $600 million, with about 2/3 paid out already.

Orthopedic devices maker Zimmer Holdings [1] (NYSE:ZMH [2]) expects to pay nearly $618 million in total to handle legal complaints spurred by the temporarily 2008 recall of its Durom metal-on-metal acetabular hip components, according to the company's latest earnings release.

Zimmer in 2008 pulled the devices off of shelves for a period of about 1 month while it investigated "certain reports of an unusually high rate of revision," according to regulatory filings from the time.

The company ultimately attributed device failures to improper implantation techniques [3] and restored the devices to the market, but not without garnering some unwanted legal attention.